Technology news

NASA and the White House will ask Congress for an extra $1.6 billion in next year’s budget to accelerate human missions to the Moon and return people to the lunar surface by 2024. The space agency is requesting these funds in addition to the $21 billion budget that the president already requested for NASA. That’s according to a new tweet from President Trump on Monday, who claimed that NASA will be going back to space in a “big way.”
The funding proposal is laid out in a

It’s not looking great for ride-hailing giant Uber (NYSE: UBER). Today, Uber closed its second day of trading down more than 18.8% from its IPO price at $37.25 per share, with a market cap of $62.2 billion.
Uber, which was previously valued at $72 billion by venture capitalists on the private market, priced its stock at $45 a share for an $82.4 billion valuation last week. On day one, Uber closed at $41.57 a share.
In a memo obtained by CNBC, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees today

The Xbox One S with 1TB of internal storage (and a disc drive) currently costs $207.80 at Walmart. This is far less than its usual $299 price, and it’s almost $50 cheaper than Microsoft’s new Xbox One S All-Digital model that omits a Blu-ray disc drive.
For context, this price is just a handful of dollars shy of the best price seen during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It doesn’t come with a game, though the Xbox Game Pass is a decent alternative if you just want to try a bunc

Daniel Wu Contributor Dan Wu is a privacy counsel and legal engineer at Immuta. He holds a JD from Harvard University, and is a PhD candidate for Social Policy and Sociology at The Harvard Kennedy School.More posts by this contributorInnovations in inclusive housing How to save the third wave of technology from itself
In this section of my exploration into innovation in inclusive housing, I am digging into the 200+ companies impacting the key phases of developing and managing housing.
Inno

Daniel Wu Contributor Dan Wu is a privacy counsel and legal engineer at Immuta. He holds a JD from Harvard University, and is a PhD candidate for Social Policy and Sociology at The Harvard Kennedy School.More posts by this contributorInnovations in inclusive housing How to save the third wave of technology from itself
Housing is big money. The industry has trillions under management and hundreds of billions under development.
And investors have noticed the potential. Opendoor raised nearly $1.3

Apple just released its updated Apple TV app today across iOS and tvOS — it’s a big deal for the company, laying the crucial groundwork for the company’s new TV strategy with direct-to-consumer subscriptions and Apple’s own upcoming Apple TV Plus video streaming service.So why does it still default to portrait mode for playing back video?
There’s simply no way around it — actually watching video using Apple’s native TV app is just an appalling user expe

Apple and Bird are working together to make the process of renting a dockless electric scooter even easier. Soon, anyone with an iPhone can use Apple Pay’s NFC tag to unlock and rent a Bird scooter, completely bypassing the e-scooter company’s app.The news was first mentioned by Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president for internet services, in her keynote at the 2019 Transact conference in Las Vegas, which is geared toward people in the payment industry. In addition to Bird, B

On Friday, the US raised import taxes to 25 percent on billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods, marking the latest escalation in a growing trade war that has raged on for more than a year. When the tariffs were initially announced, many saw them as a negotiating tactic, designed to put pressure on the ongoing trade talks between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. But with Trump now in Washington and cheerleading the new taxes on Twitter, it seems clear that the 25 perce

Spotify is testing its own version of Stories — the sharing format popularized by social apps like Snapchat and Instagram that has since made its way to other apps like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and others. In Spotify’s case, it’s not called “Stories” but rather “Storyline,” and the focus is on allowing artists to share their own insights, inspiration, details about their creative process or other meanings behind the music.
This is very much similar to

Home assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant are becoming ubiquitous, and as that happens, more and more users are discovering how much of their data is actually being collected by these handy items. The Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler was so taken aback by the amount of audio material that Amazon collected that he actually made a song out of his clips.
If all this makes you uneasy, you can delete the recordings already made by Alexa and Google Assistant — but of the two,

A week ago, beauty vlogger James Charles was attending the Met Gala on YouTube’s behalf and jetting off to Australia to meet thousands of fans. This week, he’s become YouTube’s latest villain, losing subscribers at a record rate, all because of a 43-minute takedown video by one of YouTube’s original beauty gurus.
The drama is a perfect example of how power dynamics work within the world of YouTube. Since the lengthy video was posted on Friday, Charles has lost more than

Since the launch of its IPO in mid-April, Zoomstock has skyrocketed, up nearly 30% as of Monday’s open. However, as the company’s valuation continues to tick up, analysts and industry pundits are now diving deeper to try to unravel what the company’s future growth might look like.
TechCrunch’s venture capital ax Kate Clark has been following the story with a close eye and will be sitting down for an exclusive conversation with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan on Wednesday at 10:00

Twitteron Monday afternoon disclosed a bug that in certain conditions resulted in an account’s location data being shared with a Twitter partner — even if the user had not opted in to sharing that data. The bug only affected a portion of Twitter’s iOS user base, the company says, and they’ve since been notified of the issue.
Affected users had more than one Twitter account on iOS, and had chosen to share their precise location using the optional feature in one account. Tw

The well-known tech startup routine of coming up with an idea, raising money from VCs in increasing rounds as valuations continue to rise, and then eventually going public or getting acquired has been around for as long as the myth of Silicon Valley itself. But the evolution of Mailchimp — a notable, bootstrapped outlier out of Atlanta, Ga., that provides email and other marketing services to small businesses — tells a very different story of tech startup success.
As the company clos

Lenovo’s ThinkPads are some of the best laptops you can buy, but they’re also some of the company’s pricier devices, with the average ThinkPad starting at above the $1,000 mark. Though the company has released more affordable options, it’s now introducing an entirely new line of ThinkBook laptops that combines the best of ThinkPad features at a price point that’s a bit more approachable.
The ThinkBook line starts at $729, and is aimed at small businesses that want

Luckin Coffeeis the most energizing IPO in recent memory, and not just because it sells caffeine.
Most venture-backed startups can take a decade to reach the public markets. Luckin cut that time down to about 18 months. Founder Jenny Qian Zhiya opened a trial coffee shop in Beijing, with a focus on rapid coffee delivery and mobile app ordering. Fast forward to today, and the company’s 2,370 stores conducted nearly 17 million transactions in the most recent quarter ending March 31.
Now Luck

A new feature rolling out to Uberdrivers offers a semi-customized look at their “journey” with the company. On the face of it, the video is similar to the sort offered up by Facebook on the occasion of anniversaries. Here, it pairs a driver’s stats with jaunty music and animation, highlighting how long they’ve been driving and when they started with the service.
The video pulls other journey metrics that it’s already begun sharing with riders through the app, includ

Facebookhas been repeatedly (and rightly) hammered for its treatment of the content moderators who ensure the site doesn’t end up becoming a river of images, videos and articles embodying the worst of humanity.
Those workers, and the hundreds (if not thousands) of other contractors Facebook employs to cook food, provide security and provide transportation for the social media giant’s highly compensated staff, are getting a little salary boost and a commitment to better care for the t

Boost Mobile, a virtual mobile network owned by Sprint, has confirmed hackers have broken into an unknown number of customer accounts.
The company quietly posted a notification of its data breach almost exactly two months after March 14, when Boost said the breach happened.
“Boost.com experienced unauthorized online account activity in which an unauthorized person accessed your account through your Boost phone number and Boost.com PIN code,” said the notification. “The Boost Mo

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
1. Amazon offers employees $10K and 3 months’ pay to start their own delivery businesses
Amazon’spartner program, first announced last year, includes access to the company’s delivery technology, hands-on training and a suite of other discounts for assets and services.
Now, the c

“Ghost work” is anthropologist Mary L. Gray’s term for the invisible labor that powers our technology platforms. When Gray, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, first arrived at the company, she learned that building artificial intelligence requires people to manage and clean up data to feed to the training algorithms. “I basically started asking the engineers and computer scientists around me, ‘Who are the people you pay to do this task work of labeling imag

Spotifyhas launched a more slimmed-down version of its streaming music app in India, only months after its public debut in the country. The Android-only app, Spotify Lite, is only 11 MB in size compared with 30 MB for the main app — a change that’s common to apps targeting emerging markets where bandwidth and storage space are concerns.
The company had already tested Spotify Lite in other areas, including Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil and others. The app has a simi

Slack this morning disclosed estimated preliminary financial results for the first quarter of 2019 ahead of a direct listing planned for June 20.
Citing an addition of paid customers, the workplace messaging service posted revenues of about $134 million, up 66% from $81 million in the first quarter of 2018. Losses from operations increased from $26 million in Q1 2018 to roughly $39 million this year.
In addition to filing updated paperwork, the Slack executive team gathered on Monday to make a f

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones season 8, episode 5, “The Bells.”
A lot has been written lately about how Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss don’t really understand some of the characters they inherited from A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin — particularly the show’s smartest and most foresighted characters. The behind-the-scenes schemers and string-pullers who shaped the show have fallen on hard times in recent seas

We may be poised on the precipice of a new era of spaceflight, but leaping prematurely off it would be a costly mistake — which is why the delays and failures of SpaceX’sCrew Dragon, the new spacecraft that will likely be soonest to take humans to space, are a matter for concern but not worry. In space, you expect the unexpected.
The sudden explosion of a Crew Dragon test capsule is frightening and frankly embarrassing to a company so heavily focused on an image of futurity and relia

A report by The Wall Street Journal last week revealed a secretive U.S. military weapon designed explicitly to reduce civilian casualties in targeted strikes. Unlike a traditional Hellfire missile dispatched from an aerial drone, the missile variant packs no payload, no explosive. The catch? It drops 100 pounds of metal on a target, shredding them to pieces with six giant knives.
As the WSJ reports, the weapon, developed under the Obama administration, is only deployed in special circumstances.

For those looking to work out at home and maybe even lose a little weight, elliptical machines are the top choice for many fitness fanatics who prefer to keep the gym as close to them as possible — AKA their house. 
Most ellipticals don’t take up that much space, and they provide really comprehensive cardio workouts for even the most dedicated gym rats. 
But for some reason, ellipticals aren’t as well-respected as other cardio-based workout machines — we presume

It’s only been a few months since Adobe launched its Commerce Cloud, based on its $1.6 billion acquisition of Magento. Today, at its Imagine 2019 conference, the company announced a number of updates to Magento that focus on expanding the platform’s reach for the small- and mid-size businesses that use the service.
When Adobe acquired Magento, many of these smaller companies that use the service worried that Adobe would mostly focus on its existing base of large enterprise customers

The redesigned Apple TV app, first announced back at the company’s March event, is being released today on iOS, Apple TV, and Samsung’s latest smart TVs. To make that happen, Apple is rolling out updated versions of iOS and tvOS with a refreshed look and support for a new lineup of paid Apple TV Channels, including HBO, Showtime, Starz, Epix, and other networks. Users can subscribe to Apple TV Channels directly from the Apple TV app, and all content can be watched from right inside

Here’s a big AppleTV update. Not THE big Apple TV update. The whole Apple TV+ thing is still forthcoming, but this major update to the app should go a ways toward setting the stage for its arrival in the fall.
The new version of the app arrives today across a slew of different platforms, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and all of Samsung’s 2019 Smart TVs (and select 2018 models) — per the announcement the company made earlier this year at the big TV+ event.
That event also off

Facebook will increase the hourly pay rate for thousands of contract workers across the United States, the company said today. Its base rate for contractors will rise from $15 an hour to $18, with slightly higher raises in cities with higher costs of living. The changes will go into effect by the middle of next year, the company said, and it will explore bringing similar raises to other sites around the world. The move comes after reporting from The Verge and others about the long-term impact o

After being crowned by Burger King as the first meat replacement patty to roll out nationally with one of the largest fast food chains, Impossible Foods has raised $300 million in capital.
The financing brings the company’s total equity raise to $750 million — and provides a sizable pool of funds to draw from as it continues to compete with its newly publicly traded rival, Beyond Meat.Beyond Meat rockets in early trading on Nasdaq, reaching a valuation of over $3 billionBoth companie

What makes a good ruler? The question has haunted Game of Thrones for years, and with just one episode left, it seems the writers are determined to reach an answer. Or, as Niccolò Machiavelli phrases the problem, Game of Thrones wants to know whether it’s better for a ruler to “be loved more than feared, or feared more than loved?”
Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones in general, but especially season 8, episode 5, “The Bells.”
Does might really make right?
Th

The mayor of Jersey City, Steven Fulop, has made the unusual request to have his Twitter verification removed. In a tweet posted this morning, Fulop said he wanted his account to return to its unverified status. “I kind of took pride in that,” he said, “it reinforced I shouldn’t take myself too seriously and just work hard in my job.”
On the face of it, Fulop’s request makes little sense. Twitter verification ostensibly just proves that he is who he says he i

Warning: spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones season 8, episode 5, “The Bells”
Throughout the last season of Game of Thrones, writers and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been rapidly building toward the idea that madness runs in the Targaryen family, and Daenerys Targaryen might at any moment snap and become a dangerous tyrant. They say they’ve been seeding that ending since season 1 when she reacted with cold calm to her husband Khal Drogo executing her brother Vi

Whether you like it or not, facial recognition tech to check in for your flight will soon be coming to an airport near you.
More than a dozen U.S. airports are already rolling out the technology, with many more to go before the U.S. government hits its target of enrolling the largest 20 airports in the country before 2021.
Facial recognition is highly controversial and has many divided. On the one hand, it reduces paper tickets and is meant to be easier for travelers to check in at the airport b

A recently launched podcast analytics company is debuting its newest product today: trackable URLs that will let creators know how listeners found a podcast and whether the marketing message that got them there was effective. The tool, called SmartLinks, comes from Chartable, and it emphasizes just how much work needs to be done to make podcasts as trackable as the rest of the web.
Right now, podcast marketing often involves sharing links to a show, whether that means Instagram, Facebook, newsl

Even the most advanced chatbots can’t hold a decent conversation, but AI systems are definitely getting better at generating the written word. A new web app provides ample proof, letting anyone enter a text prompt to which AI software will automatically respond.
Enter the start of a made-up news article, and it’ll finish it for you. Ask it a question (by formatting your input like this: “Q: What should I do today?”), and it’ll happily respond.The site is called Tal

The Verge and The Goods by Vox are back with season 4 of the podcast Why’d You Push That Button?, a show about all of the choices we’re forced to make with technology. This season, hosts Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Carman discuss topics like why iPhone users judge people with green bubbles in iMessage, why users maintain anonymous accounts, and why people slide into DMs. They’ll also host a miniseries about death online and how the internet changes how we die.Plus, the team has

The Supreme Court is letting an antitrust lawsuit against Apple proceed — and it’s rejected Apple’s argument that iOS App Store users aren’t really its customers. The Supreme Court upheld the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Apple v. Pepper, agreeing in a 5-4 decision that Apple app buyers could sue the company for allegedly driving up prices. “Apple’s line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of

A new payment network called Flexa is launching today that’ll let you spend cryptocurrencies in physical stores. The technology currently supports bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, and the gemini dollar, and it’ll work at retailers including GameStop, Nordstrom, Whole Foods, Caribou Coffee, Jamba Juice, and Crate and Barrel. The eventual goal for Flexa is to support payments using any cryptocurrency to pay any merchant.
You pay for your items using Flexa’s app, Spedn, which genera

In a carefully framed deal, ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired the intellectual property and key personnel of mobile analytics company Appsee for an undisclosed price. Under the terms of the deal, the co-founders and R&D team will be joining ServiceNow after the deal closes.
It’s worth noting that ServiceNowdid not acquire Appsee’s customers, and the company is expected to wind down its existing business over the next 12 months.
Appseeprovides more than pure n